Peggy Fortnum, Illustrator of Paddington: He was an orphaned immigrant from “darkest Peru” who took his name from the Central London railway station where he was rescued by an agreeable English couple named Mr. and Mrs. Brown. They spotted him on the platform, sitting alone on an old leather suitcase and sporting an odd-looking hat and a handwritten label that implored, “Please look after this bear.” Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

Friday, April 08, 2016

Houston Chronicle: Prince sang the national anthem and God Bless America during the seventh-inning stretch for over a quarter of a century for the Astros, and became a regular face at Minute Maid Park.

In his "Afterword" for Quarry's Vote, Max Allan Collins says that the Quarry books "sank like a stone" on their original publication. While that may be true, they did not go unnoticed by some of us who were already fans of Collins' work and who eagerly grabbed up Quarry's accounts of his adventures as soon as they were published by Berkley Books. I just checked, and my copies of those first four books still sit comfortably on my shelves. I thought the series had ended with the fourth book in 1977, but ten years later a fifth one showed up, this time in hardcovers. It was titled Primary Target, so naturally I had to have it. I still have that one, too, of course. Then, nearly twenty years later, Collins wrote a new Quarry novel for Hard Case Crime, and the series took on new life. The new books were successful, Quarry's got his own TV series on Cinemax, and the first five Quarry novels have been returned to print by Hard Case Crime. One of those is Quarry's Vote, which is actually Primary Target with a new title. Hardly a forgotten book, but I'm counting it because of the title change and because the book has been out of print for so long.In fact, Primary Target has been out of print for so long that I didn't remember what it was about until I started to read it again, and then I remembered a good bit of it. It's an excellent entry in the series that finds Quarry married, settled down, and more or less happy, a bit surprised that he's living a "normal" life. When a man who knows more about him than he should shows up and offers Quarry a million-dollar contract, Quarry turns him down. Not just because he's happy and settled but also because the contract is on a man running for president, and Quarry knows that after the contract was fulfilled, he'd become a loose end. We all know what happens to loose ends.What Quarry, having been out of the game for a while, forgets is that even if he turns the contract down, he becomes a loose end. His wife is killed, and though Quarry kills the killers, he wants to get the people who set things in motion. And we're off to the races.As in all the Quarry novels, the pacing is excellent, there's humor, and the story has several satisfying twists before it gets to the end. Along the way Collins gets to comment a bit on politics and politicians, and you can be excused if you think some of the things he says remind you a little of the present day situation. This is another fine entry in the Quarry series, and it's great to have it back in print.

Thursday, April 07, 2016

The Smoking Gun: A 27-year-old man who last night summoned police to his South Carolina home explained that he dialed 911 because his mother was “mad and yelling at him.”
For consuming “the last of the methamphetamine” in their residence.

StarTribune.com: Gary Shulze, who knew just about everything there is to know about local writers and mystery writers and the wonderful, delicate art of selling books, died Wednesday. Schulze, 66, ran Once Upon a Crime Bookstore for nearly 14 years with his wife, Pat Frovarp. They sold the store a week ago because of Shulze’s declining health. He had been diagnosed with leukemia in 2007, which returned two years ago.Hat tip to Steve Stilwell.

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Hollywood Reporter: Bill Henderson, a well-respected jazz vocalist and actor, died Sunday of natural causes in Los Angeles, according to Lynne Robin Green, president of LWBH Music Publishers. He was 90. A native of Chicago, Henderson sang with the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Quincy Jones, the Charlie Haden Quintet and many others. His 1963 album, Bill Henderson With the Oscar Peterson Trio, is considered a classic in the jazz vernacular.

Merle Haggard Dies on His 79th Birthday: The music world has lost an icon: Merle Haggard died Wednesday on his 79th birthday, reports TMZ. He'd been fighting double pneumonia since last year. Haggard was elected into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1994, and as ABC23 notes, he "won just about every music award" over a career that gave him 40 No. 1 hits. Perhaps his biggest, "Mama Tried" from 1968, was added to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry earlier this year. Haggard was a big part of the "outlaw" country movement with the likes of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings. Hat tip to Deb.

The New Yorker: The film itself is a wildly original work of genius that suffered the fate of many works of genius: being out of step with its time. I wish Judy could read this article about one of her favorite movies. She'd agree.

The City of Literature: 40 Books Set in Paris: It's a book lover's dream to wander the very streets that inspired Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and so many others. You might step into the Salon at 27 rue de Fleurus where Gertrude Stein mentored Ernest Hemingway, or have a drink at the café littéraires Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, the long-ago haunts of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and their fellow The Lost Generation writers.

Carlo Mastrangelo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Carlo Mastrangelo (October 5, 1938 - April 4, 2016) was an American doo-wop and progressive rock singer. Born and raised in the Bronx, he lived in an apartment on the corner of 179th St. and Mapes Ave. He was an original member of The Belmonts (with or without Dion DiMucci), a popular singing group of the late 1950s and early 1960s.[1][2] He also led the progressive rock/jazz ensemble, "Pulse", during the 1970s.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the '90s, when Charlie Sheen wasn't a punchline, when Chris O'Donnell looked as if he might be a star, when Kiefer Sutherland didn't know that he was running out of time, when Tim Curry was . . . okay, Tim Curry's still great when it comes to villainy. What we have here is yet another of those movies that everybody hates except me. I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for any version of The Three Musketeers, and I've reviewed several of the movies about them in the past. I like this one, too. It was filmed in Austria, and it looks great. Besides that, the cast seems to be having a good time, especially Oliver Platt as Porthos. He's very funny and steals every scene he's in. Sutherland and Sheen are good, and O'Donnell is pretty. Not as pretty as Rebecca de Mornay as Milady, but close. The story sort of follows the familiar framework, and there's plenty of jazzed up action (even a bit of the martial arts variety) and pounding hoofbeats. And sword fights and daring rescues.Sure, this movie's not going to make anybody forget the great two-parter directed by Richard Lester, but if you're still in touch with your inner 10-year-old, it's a lot of fun. Or it was for me. You might hate it like everybody else does.

LOS ANGELES — Erik Bauersfeld, the veteran radio actor who voiced Return of the Jedi characters Admiral Ackbar and Bib Fortuna and reprised the Ackbar role for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, has died. He was 93.

SleuthSayers: It's almost a forgotten thing which is a shame. Independent mystery bookstores. Yes, still a few around but not so many as there were at one time. My late husband, Elmer, and I were looking for something for him to do when he retired from commercial construction in late 1989. He had been doing handy man work, house inspections prior to their sale and he had decided he was getting to an age where crawling around attics and under floors in the TX heat was not fun anymore.

Neatorama: Joe Medicine Crow was the last person to meet that code, though far from the windswept plains where his ancestors conceived it. During World War II, when he was a scout for the 103rd Infantry in Europe, he strode into battle wearing war paint beneath his uniform and a yellow eagle feather inside his helmet. So armed, he led a mission through German lines to procure ammunition. He helped capture a German village and disarmed — but didn’t kill — an enemy soldier. And, in the minutes before a planned attack, he set off a stampede of 50 horses from a Nazi stable, singing a traditional Crow honor song as he rode away.

The New York Times: Adrienne Corri, an actress whose movie career lasted nearly five decades and encompassed a wide range of roles, but who was probably best known as the victim in an infamous rape scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” died on March 13 at her home in London. She was 84. Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

Cave of the Crystals: Within this cavern, exposed when the mining company pumped out groundwater, the miners found crystals measuring up to 12 meters (almost 40 feet) long and weighing up to 55 tons. They were 20 times bigger than the largest crystals anyone had seen before. It was one of the most spectacular mineralogical discoveries ever made. They named it the "Cueva de Los Cristales," or the Cave of the Crystals.